May 13, 2009

One used to be able to "listen" to half the conversation on a personal message between your twitter friend and their friend you don'f follow. As of Tuesday, you can't. Twits are enraged, as they used to find cool friends of friends this way.
First explanation: This is better, trust us. Second explanation: The thing's broke, okay? Wait for a new thing.
Twitter’s Response to #fixreplies: We Can’t

Twitter has responded to the #fixreplies controversy today, in which a number of vocal users have objected to a forced feature-removal....
Originally, Twitter said they were disabling the feature because it was confusing, although in fairness the only people who had it turned on were those who had chosen to. Today, however, Twitter adds that this isn’t the whole story: the engineering team says the feature had to be removed for technical reasons. From the Twitter blog:

Whoa, Feedback!
We’re getting a ton of extremely useful feedback about yesterday’s update to Settings. The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn’t have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever. Nevertheless, it’s amazing to wake up and see all the tweets about this change.
We’re hearing your feedback and reading through it all. One of the strongest signals is that folks were using this setting to discover and follow new and interesting accounts—this is something we absolutely want to support. Our product, design, user experience, and technical teams have started brainstorming a way to surface a new, scalable way to address this need.

May 11, 2009

There is a very, very long tradition of incitement at protests by undercover police. This wouldn't be the first, fifth, or fiftieth time.

An MP who was involved in last month's G20 protests in London is to call for an investigation into whether the police used agents provocateurs to incite the crowds.

Liberal Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.

Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon.

Details surrounding the bank stress tests continues to make headlines, with the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times leading with how the U.S. government has, and will continue, to make concessions to the banks. According to the WSJ, the Federal Reserve’s initial estimate of capital deficits was much larger than the $75 billion or so reported Thursday. But the agency, toeing a fine line between trying to restore confidence with the tests while also maintaining its credibility, finally agreed to scale back some of the findings "following two weeks of intense negotiations." A senior executive at one of the banks actually described the early numbers as “mind-numbing,” while another detailed Bank of America’s (BAC) reaction to a more than $50 billion capital hole as “shocked.” Eventually, BofA’s capital deficit was pegged at $33.9 billion, which, according to a bank spokesperson, was reached through an “adjustment for first-quarter results and errors made by regulators in their analysis” and not as a result of lobbying.

May 07, 2009

Former Bolingbrook police sergeant Drew Peterson was arrested today in the death of his ex-wife, Kathleen Savio, who was found drowned in an empty bathtub in March 2004, according to Will County State's Atty. James Glasgow.
At an evening news conference, authorities said a $20 million bail was included in the arrest warrant for Peterson.
Will County state's attorney's office spokesman Chuck Pelkie confirmed Peterson was arrested about 5:40 p.m. during a traffic stop at Lily Cache Lane and Weber Road in Bolingbrook in connection with an indictment in the murder of Savio.
When reached early Thursday evening, Peterson's attorney, Joel Brodsky, said he was unaware of the arrest.
"You know more than I do. I'm on a plane it's taking off in 5 minutes to go to NYC. I guess they'll have a bond hearing Monday," he said.